Virginia Goes to the Birds

In late July 1861, the noted lithographer John Bachmann published a captivating visual picture of Virginia, offering Northerners a powerful and intuitive way to follow the ongoing conflict. Of course, there were already lots of maps of the Old Dominion. What set this one apart? Perspective: looking westward with the Chesapeake Bay in the foreground, it offered a bird’s eye view, an intuitive but, for many, novel look at the unfolding conflict. His “wide angle lens” approach enabled viewers to follow not just the actual location of the battles, but the terrain of the conflict and a larger sense of the geography of the eastern theater.

Bachmann had come to the United States from Germany a few decades earlier, one of the many who fled after the failed revolutions of 1848. But beyond this, we know fairly little about the man — except for the impressive maps he left behind. From 1849 to 1885 he created a several birds’ eye views of northeastern cities, and a series devoted to New York City that constitutes a remarkable visual record of the city’s changing landscape during a period of tremendous growth and upheaval. In fact, he coined the term “birds’ eye” to refer to an oblique panoramic view of the landscape, though he was by no means the first to adopt this cartographic perspective. Bird’s eye views were most commonly used in the 19th century to promote cities, but during the war were put to another end entirely: making sense of the war for a population with only limited cartographic literacy.

Bachmann began to prepare this view of Virginia well before the fighting broke out. Though he claims to have “drawn from nature,” implying that he stood on a mountaintop and saw it for himself, no such perspective actually exists. Still, he created a compelling document: the view conveys the topography of an immense region at the same time that it prominently shows militarily crucial details, including ships, railroad lines and cities. Distances between major cities and forts are marked to convey a sense of the task ahead. Crossed swords identify battles and skirmishes at Bethel, Bull Run, Acquia Creek, Centreville and elsewhere; the absence of later engagements indicates that he finished the map in late July of 1861.

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His panorama of the Chesapeake was a success, and he used the same approach to map the Confederacy at least seven other times. These images lie between art and cartography: some mapmakers might have challenged their mathematical accuracy, yet the distortion was intentional way of conveying the shape of the land. The panoramas convey the larger topography at stake, and emphasize the geographical approaches into Confederate territory from the Union perspective: from the Atlantic west, from the Gulf Coast north and from the Ohio Valley south.

Unlike battle maps that covered a discrete area or a particular battle, Bachmann’s birds’ eye views enabled some sense of the actual landscape of the war. He took care to issue these maps as contiguous documents: each was issued and sold separately, but designed to be laid together to create a composite view of the entire Confederacy. Recently, the map collector David Rumsey has digitally integrated the three Atlantic maps to demonstrate Bachmann’s larger purpose. Together, these three offer a view, however contorted, of the contours of the coastal theater of war, a particularly valuable way to see the progress and military relevance of the blockade.

The bird’s-eye perspective was widely adapted during the war, to make sense of both large and small landscapes, strategic positions, camps and prisons. The sweep and scale of these panoramic views also anticipates the immensely popular oblique aviation maps of World War II, where the viewer is placed in a perspective above the landscape. They even convey the same kind of perspective of Google Earth, which captures the ability to “fly to any place” around the world and see the landscape in three dimensions.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.